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A
tall, thin, youngish man wearing an absent expression emerged out of the
maze of expensive machines filling most of the lab. He had spent the last
half-hour vainly trying to remember what it was he had told himself not
to forget, but his mind had dissolved in trivia. It had not offered a single
useful suggestion--or even any useless ones. It just lay there. He had come
in search of caffeine like a rising diver looking for air.

The pot was there, the water was there,
the white powder pretending to be cream was there, but the can had neither
beans nor grounds nor dust in it. Someone had shaken out the very dregs
and had not provided a fresh supply, in crass contravention of the law of
the lab and human rights.

Norman Rathbone stared at the machine,
cursing intensely but quietly. In any sane legal system, murdering the irresponsible
party would be considered justifiable homicide, but, knowing his boss, the
man would object because terminating the staff was his sole prerogative.

Then Norman brightened. All was not
lost. He headed to the Coke machine. Lesser minds than his, however, had
beaten him to it, as had happened so often before in his brilliant but impractical
life. There were cans aplenty of sweet and fizzy stuff flavored with lemon
or cola or cream, but not a single can of anything promising consciousness.
Norman was faced with the prospect of managing Dr. Kriegel's lab--of tracing
gel runs, troubleshooting data analysis, discussing undergraduate term papers,
and making polite phone calls about missing crosslinkers--while powered
by nothing but water.

His feeling that things could
not get any worse was soon proved false when he arrived back at his desk
to the sound of his phone ringing.

It was Gerry Kriegel himself,
apparently in urgent need of a conference with his right-hand man. "Where
were you?" he demanded, but gave Norman no time to explain by immediately
continuing, "Need to see you." He hung up.

It pained Norman to work for this man,
but what else could he do? All the big labs, the ones that might help him
launch his own career, were run by grand old men who hadn't done anything
but raise funds for years. With the funds, they hired people like him who
delivered impressive, creative results by focusing like a laser on a single
problem for days on end. However, the job of managing a lab used none of
those talents and consisted instead of interruptions interrupted by interruptions,
like this one, for instance. He ran his hands through his floppy, straight
black hair in a frazzled gesture that made loose locks fall on his forehead
and gave him a perpetually uncombed look. He threaded his way out of the
machines and stuck his head into the boss's office.

"Hi Gerry," he said. He was always a
serious young man, but now he was downright somber from overload with frustration.
"What can I do for you?"

The boss waved him in with barely a
glance, as if he were a steerable fly. Unlike a fly though, which carries
on being a fly under all circumstances, Norman had to work at keeping a
frown off his face. He worked ten-hour days as it was. He needed less work,
not more.

Norman surveyed the coffee cups, latte
cups and espresso cups littering the office and felt quite certain that
he had found the culprit of the coffee can. Kriegel's boiled-looking eyes
and grey skin suggested that pickling himself in coffee was not helping,
but this was only a small consolation.

The boss lifted a few forms from the
top of a drift of papers covering his desk and much of his computer.

"Caffeine," he said shortly, waving
the sheets.

Norman stiffened. Invisibly, he hoped,
as the first fright receded. Had he been found out?

"Caffeine's not working. Find out why."
He shoved the sheets at Norman. "Could be a Nobel in it for this lab," he
added, using an almost complete sentence in honor of the idea despite the
effort it cost him.

Gingerly, Norman took the papers. He
pretended to study them to give himself time to frame a response. Fear flipped
into hysterical humor as he almost chuckled at the irony of imagining Kriegel's
lab covered in glory for finding the cure--until the media found out it
had also created the original problem. In his mind's eye, Kriegel sputtered
protestations about how he was shocked--shocked!--that anyone could think
he would do such a thing for profit. But back to the problem at hand, and
an appropriately tentative demeanor.

"That would explain a few things," he
finally said. "What led you to that hypothesis?"

"Tested my pulse, skin conductivity.
No changes, even after a double espresso. Sent the damn stuff off to a chemistry
lab and it's full of caffeine. So something's happened." Even in his exhausted
state, Kriegel looked rather smug at being the brains of the outfit who
had figured this out.

The meaning of the papers he was holding
finally penetrated to Norman's brain. There was a budget line for this new
project, a technician, and information about funding for which he was to
apply. But nowhere did it tell him how to find the time to plan and execute
completely new work, supervise yet another technician, and write yet another
detailed, ten-page grant application. Before he could formulate a polite
way to ask, Kriegel carried on.

"Oh yeah. Another thing. Glass breakage,"
he said shortly, picking up an invoice. "Costs money. Rudi, right? Dock
her pay."

Gertrude Frobisher was an older woman
with grown children who was starting over in life. Norman couldn't begin
to fathom why she would want to start over as a lab tech, but there it was.

"Actually," said Norman, "she's responsible
for one three-dollar beaker in the last six months, which, considering she
does most of the dishes, is well below average. She really has excellent
aptitude for lab work. The distilling column, the sequencer capillary array,
and the cloning shaker vessel were all Dwayne, I'm afraid." That was thousands
of dollars worth of precision-made glass equipment, which Gerry Kriegel's
own undergraduate student had calmly broken.

"Ah," said the boss. Having an undergraduate
in the lab was good for Kriegel since it showed he cared about education.
He pondered the relative merits of brownie points versus money.

Dwayne Plotkin's ID said he was twenty-one,
but Norman had known less carefree toddlers. Judging by course work, Dwayne
was brilliant. He wore exercise tights and layered, ragged T-shirts and
was the goofiest young man in three counties as far as Norman was concerned.
Norman was the one who actually supervised him, since the boss had real
work to do.

After some thought Kriegel added, "Then
it's an educational expense. Tell June to put it on the right account. That
doesn't come out of my grants."

That solved the matter for Gerry Kriegel.
Norman was about to ask whether there was anything else when the PA system
crackled. June's pleasant phone voice came over the air,

"Paging Dr. Rathbone. You have a delivery
at the office. Dr. Rathbone, to the office, please."

It is, thought Norman, continually something.

He picked up the package, unpacked the
power supply, fitted it into the dead gel rig, and connected it. One of
the new postdocs needed help with a lab procedure. Someone else couldn't
figure out why his DNA amplification had not worked. Troubleshooting the
amplification uncovered a problem with primers that needed to be reordered.
And so it went, hour after hour, interrupted further by a dreadful, ostensibly
voluntary seminar where time stopped completely, together with all his remaining
higher brain functions. Lunch never happened. June, the secretary, left
at the stroke of five, as always.

It was shortly thereafter that he heard
Rudi in the lab across the hall heatedly exclaiming, "DwAYne!" That reminded
him he still needed to buttonhole the kid to discuss his term paper.

He hurried over to the room, listening
to Rudi's voice climbing into ever higher registers, which even opera singers
might have envied had any been around.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?
Do you have any idea of the effort, the expense, the time--"

Norman was nearly running by the time
he skidded to a stop inside the lab. Now what? he was thinking. But he thought
it in the comparatively detached way of a lab manager expecting to find
acid corroding the fifty thousand dollar centrifuge for which he will not
be paying. It was much worse than that.

Hundreds of tiny plastic vials of samples
lay quietly thawing on the lab table nearest the ultracold freezer. Dwayne
still had his head in there, rooting around, making a mess, looking for
something, while his muffled mumble insisted, "Well, I've gotta find it,
haven't I? I mean, Gerry wants it, so I've gotta find it, right? It's in
here somewhere, so don't worry, I'll find it in a minute." Meanwhile the
freezer's temperature was rising from -80 C to -75 , -70 , -65 . The alarm,
which was so loud you felt it rather than heard it, would go off any minute.

"CLOSE THE DAMN DOOR," bellowed Norman.

Dwayne's head finally appeared, with
a look of bored superiority. You guys, his eyebrows said, need to get a
life. Norman pushed the door closed the moment he could do it without killing
the kid.

"Get ziplocs," he ordered Rudi. "We'll
get the sample tubes in bags for now and get them back in the freezer. Sort
them out later. Hopefully there aren't any competent cells--" and that was
when he saw it as his eyes raked over the hundreds of little vials scattered
by Dwayne like a dog digging for a bone. The three vials labeled "caf" followed
by numbers. He remembered what it was he'd forgotten. He'd forgotten to
relabel those vials to something cryptic. They had the crucial bits of DNA
he was going to need when it was time to make an antidote. He had had, from
the outset, every intention of making an antidote.

He tried not to look at the three vials.
He tried not to look at Rudi to see if she'd noticed them. She would probably
make the connection in a heartbeat and then she had the know-how to track
it down and prove it. After all, even Kriegel had noticed that caffeine
in larger and larger doses was having less and less effect. But engineering
an anti-caffeine gene was easy. Norman's genius lay in coming up with the
perfect vector to carry the gene into everyone's cells: a modified cold
virus that was entirely symptomless and perfectly catching. He had made
himself immune, so everybody else slowed down while he did not. Now he usually
headed home by six or seven instead of midnight, but he wanted to hold off
on the antidote until he could go home at five. He wanted a life as well
as a job.

He busied himself sorting the vials
into groups as Rudi ran up with the bags. The caf vials were on her side
of the table--if only there were some way to palm them before--

"Hey, what are these?" Rudi said, as
she slid them toward a bag. "C.A.F? We don't have anyone whose initials
are C.A.F., do we?"

"Just keep scooping," muttered Norman.
"We'll sort them out later." He just hoped he'd be able to find the three
little vials in the mess before anyone else did.

*

As time ticked by, the
lab techs left and Dr. Kriegel himself had long since powered off to an important
dinner engagement. Various diehard postdocs and graduate students showed the
usual signs of working into the wee hours. Norman planned to wait them all
out. He was feeding his tropical fish, swimming in their brightly-lit parallel
universe on a shelf near his desk, when the doorbell blatted like a demented
fire engine. It was piped after hours to the whole lab. Judging by the volume,
the designer had understood that regardless of appearances, brain death in
all occupants was highly probable by then.

After Norman clutched the lab bench in
the usual bell shock, he stood, indecisive. If he opened the door, a black
hole of wasted time would be waiting for him. If he ignored it, a crucial
message would be missed and cause no end of trouble. He forced himself to
go to the door.

When he saw the FedEx truck, he started
to hurry.

"Nessie!" he threw open the door with
what may have been his first smile of the day. Vanessa Delaney did that to
people. She did it especially to Norman, who knew she was the only girl for
him, but was equally convinced that nerds of his ilk held no interest for
her. She wasn't exactly beautiful, but she had the gift of being pleased and
cheerful and somehow sharing her state of mind with the people around her.
She wore shorts in sleet or sun and was fit enough to join the astronaut corps.
Norman suspected her of enjoying cold showers. She seemed to enjoy everything.
She looked, for instance, delighted to be there, working late, and delivering
boxes.

"Heya, Norman. How come you don't just
give up your apartment and put a cot in the hall here?"

"That would be too convenient. There are
regulations against that. And you're obviously still running all over town
at all hours," he added.

"Beats sitting still," she returned as
she handed him the data pad to sign for the cross-linker. It was not a large
box, but it held seven thousand dollars' worth of equipment that he knew Kriegel
wanted yesterday. He signed carefully.

She was turning to leave, so he started
babbling just to keep her there a while longer.

"Nice to see someone who's still awake,"
he said. "Most of the folks here, from the secretary to the boss, can't seem
to do much but sit still. With their eyes closed."

"Tell me about it," Vanessa agreed with
a smile. "Some places, I'm starting to wonder whether I should start carrying
those electroshock defibrillators."

When he looked puzzled, she explained,
"You know, to apply to comatose people's chests like they do in the movies,
while the emergency medtech yells, 'Clear!'"

"That'll be the next thing," Norman shook
his head at the funny idea. "People will be carrying around their little biofeedback
boxes and giving themselves wake-up shocks."

"Well," said Nessie, suddenly serious,
"lots of them are carrying around their little purple pill boxes and doing
just that."

"Purple pills?" asked Norman. What purple
pills?

"You need to get out more," she said,
her eyes crinkling again. "Everybody who can afford them has been buying them.
They're speed. Got to really watch out for people coming down off that stuff.
It's mostly meth but also some designer stuff that I understand is right out
of this world."

Norman frowned. He was trying to slow
things down, damn it. Sometimes it seemed that no matter what you did, things
just got worse. "You 'understand'? You haven't tried any of the--um-performance
enhancers?" he asked with careful indifference.

"I've never been that big on drugs," she
answered easily. "Even coffee and tea and aspirin and stuff like that. I guess
I'm just used to living without them."

"Ah," he said. It figured. Her happiness
always had seemed part of her.

"My failing is beer, you know," she continued,
nodding as if this was something everyone knew and was kind enough to understand.
Norman was amazed. He wouldn't have pegged her for an alcoholic in a thousand
years.

"You--ah--don't look like someone who
drinks lots of beer," he mumbled.

"Oh, I don't drink lots of it. I just
like it and wish I could brew it." Vanessa lowered her voice so it seemed
she was telling him a secret, "I'm going to start a brewpub one of these days."
Her tone implied it was all settled except for the minor matter of picking
a specific day.

Norman was often at a loss with people,
although not usually with Nessie because she was so comfortable to be around.
Now, however, he opened his mouth but no words emerged. Nessie was a wonderful
girl who delivered packages. He'd never thought of her as a beer-drinking
businesswoman. "Well, go for it," he finally managed. "I bet you could do
anything you wanted to." That was certainly true.

Nessie shook her head decisively. "There's
only one problem. I tried brewing some, you know, but I had to set it free.
The result didn't require an environmental impact statement, but that was
all you could say for it."

"Oh come on," said Norman. "It's dead
easy. I mean, I brewed beer all through college for my fellow geeks' club."

"You brewed beer?" Vanessa cried. To her
this talent clearly ranked with the greater accomplishments of humankind.
"Was it any good?"

"Well, sure it was good. All it takes
is careful attention to temperature and sterility, so you don't get wild yeasts."
Inspiration struck him on one of its rare forays into his interpersonal relationships.
"I'll show you how, if you'd like."

Before Nessie drove off, Norman had promised
to spend Saturday with her starting a batch of beer, after buying supplies
at the microbrew store.

Dawn broke to find Norman still carefully
going through freezer bags full of randomized sample tubes. The caf tubes
had disappeared.

*

Things never work out
quite as expected. June missed filing Norman's payroll form, one of an ever-increasing
string of things she forgot. Kriegel had grown quite manic, a situation easily
explained by the bottle of purple pills Norman had spotted on his desk. Norman's
landlady had slapped him with a late fee, deaf to all reasoning that her rent
would arrive the moment his delayed paycheck did. Logically, Norman should
have been miserable. Instead he was walking on air and smiling at small children.
He had never realized before that beer could be such a powerful euphoriant,
especially since it wasn't even ready to drink yet.

He came in to work humming softly, only
to find Gerry Kriegel standing in the foyer, where June and the receptionist
had their empire, with his eyes bulging like a lobster's and his face the
color of one on the boil.

"This is the third draft," he threw a
sheaf of papers down on June's desk. "There's a typo on page three, there's
a typo on five, there's a typo on ten. There's a damn typo in the budget!
Do you realize what that could mean? Do you realize how much time it takes
to proofread all this damn incompetence? This is your job. I shouldn't have
to waste my time making sure you're doing it. You," announced Gerry Kriegel
by way of finale, "are fired."

Norman chuckled slightly to himself in
his fizzy state of mind. This boss, the one firing the secretary for four
typos, was the same one who hadn't seen what the fuss was about when Norman
had missed his paycheck. Still, it would probably be just as well to edge
out unobtrusively and come in through the side entrance.

Escape was not to be his, however. Kriegel
spotted him at the door.

"About time you got here. Need to talk
to you." He marched off toward his office, barking at the receptionist over
his shoulder, "And call Dr. Pulitzky. I need a prescription filled immediately."

Norman hurried after him, wondering if
it was purple pills the boss had run out of. Norman barely managed to squeeze
in a "Hi," before Gerry Kriegel had a full head of steam.

"Right." He marched to his desk, picked
up a cold box, whisked the top off, and shoved the box under Norman's nose.
"What's this?"

Norman's world stopped.

The three caf vials. He'd been found out.
His mind raced.

"Right," repeated Kriegel. "Didn't think
you'd have a lot to say for yourself. It had to be you. You're the only one
with the background and the skills." Then, returning apparently to his theme
for the day, he added, "You're fired."

Norman's thoughts, still running a hundred
to Kriegel's one, cascaded through his brain. Denial was totally hopeless,
contrary to the rosy scenarios he had so confidently believed until about
thirty seconds ago. But what could he do? Throw himself on the kindness of
Kriegel's heart? He wasn't sure he could find Dr. Kriegel's heart with a stethoscope.
Promise to whip up the antidote instantly, if Kriegel gave him a second chance?
The man had too much political sense to even want the antidote now.

And as he thought about political sense,
an idea mushroomed in his mind like a gas bomb.

"I don't think so," said Norman, with
the sudden aplomb of a skydiver whose parachute just opened. He eyed his boss's
pop-eyed, purple response. "I'll say you made me create the anti-caffeine
gene in the first place, so that your lab could patent a cure. When I learned
how much you planned to charge for it, I balked and then you fired me." He
leaned back and smiled.

Kriegel sputtered, speechless. Norman
waited for him to recover. After a while, Kriegel managed to spit out, "I-made
you-. You-you-"

"Yes?" said Norman, resisting the urge
to examine his fingernails. He didn't want to push the man into absolute apoplexy.
"So you're going to tell everyone that you run this lab, but you had no idea
what I was doing? And then you just happened to want me to find the antidote?
Mm-yes. That should work very well." He wondered in a detached way how long
this strange fugue state would last and what kind of gibbering idiot he would
become when it dropped him. Best to wrap this up while he was still flying.

As Norman walked back
to his desk, the feeling grew on him that he was swimming through soup, thickening
soup. He was going to have to sit down somewhere, somewhere with fresh air,
not his uninspiring desk hemmed in by humming machines. Kriegel had shoved
the cold box at him on his way out, as if getting rid of the tubes was important.
Norman rubbed the labels off, now that it really did not matter any more,
substituted qtr1, qtr2, and qtr3 instead, and put them in with some archived
samples in the freezer belonging to a long-departed postdoc. Then, moving
more and more like an automaton, he stopped by his desk and collected the
now all-important instructions from Kriegel to find the antidote. He folded
the papers precisely and placed them carefully in the inner pocket of his
lab coat. One last task, before he collapsed in his quiet, private space on
the back fire escape, was to swing by the Coke machine and hope for the best.
It was early enough yet that he was in luck this time.

Norman sat on the cold metal bars of the
emergency stairs, feeling them digging into his rear, and sipped the sweet,
fizzy stuff. He leaned his hot head against one of the cold uprights of the
railing and just breathed for a time. The minutes melted together, uncounted.

Then the door opened. Rudi knew his hiding
places simply by means of careful observation and would root him out when
sufficiently dire emergencies threatened. But this time she just sat down
on the step below his.

Norman tried to pull himself together,
as if this was merely an ordinary break.

"So. Now what?" she asked without preamble.

Norman stared. Did she somehow know all?
Or was she just asking what he was having a fit about? He needed to think
of something--.

"It's about the caf tubes, right?"

Norman stared again. There was little
else he could do with a mind as blank as his.

"Kind of a neat idea," she said, looking
dreamily out over the trees and blocky roofs of the campus and the city beyond.

Norman's repertoire of responses was limited
to staring.

"Everybody just slows down and starts
acting rational and having a life, instead of trying to find the cure for
cancer while faxing letters to the President and talking to their divorce
lawyer on their cell phone."

Norman nodded numbly. That had been the
idea.

"It could never work, you know," she continued
companionably.

No, he saw that now.

"So you told Kriegel," stated Norman.
It was all over. He might have a hold on Kriegel. He certainly had none on
her.

"No-o," she said slowly. "He was showing
some honchos the nerve growth factor which is kept in my freezer and spotted
the caf tubes."

"You keep track of the news at all?" she
asked, after a pause.

News? What did the news have to do with
this? When would he ever find the time to fool around watching news?

"June got fired this morning, you know.
She's a good kid. She's just asleep with her eyes open. It's happening everywhere.
Unemployment's up over ten percent."

Come to think of it, he had seen some
headline to that effect.

"And crime is up. Too many people needing
too many purple pills. And the stock market whooshed down 1000 points yesterday."

The stock market was always leaping and
diving like a gaffed fish. Civilization wasn't really going to collapse just
because he'd wanted a little time. Was it?

"I assume you were planning on spreading
an antidote around once you were happy?" For the first time there was a hint
of steel in Rudi's voice. He clearly had better have an antidote planned or
she would know what to do about it.

Norman nodded and almost said yes, ma'am.

"Well," she said. "Do it." She stood up.
"That's my price."

This time he did say it. "Yes, ma'am."

She smiled and went back inside.

Norman knew he was impractical, but he
was not totally lacking in sense. He might have avoided jail time and even
the boot, but he could not keep working for Kriegel. However, outside of a
lab, he could not make the antidote. And he rebelled at the thought of the
Kriegel's of the world speeding up together with everyone else. The whole
problem was their fault. They could wait till last.

Then the next problem loomed up. What
was he going to do after he left Kriegel's? His whole training, his whole
life was doing science surrounded by machines. What else could he do? He leaned
his head against the cold railing again.

Of course, there was Nessie insisting
he would make a great brewmaster. He smiled faintly for the first time in
this new lifetime of his. All she needed, she said, to start her brewpub was
another $30,000 in capital to add to her own hoard and mental capital in the
form of a brewmaster. She had grinned at him expectantly, but he had had doubts.
To begin with, they were $30,000 short and to go on with, there was just too
much to do for a couple of people to run a whole brewpub. It had seemed like
a wild idea.

Suddenly he sat up straight. One wild
idea led to another until he had a whole web of them proliferating in his
mind, like yeast in a brewing vat at just the right temperature. He could
make the antidote, he could become a highly successful brewmaster, and the
Kriegel's of the world could be the last to get the message. He could do it
all.

He smiled and went back inside too.

*

His final week at Kriegel's
lab was not an easy one. He worked till the wee hours every night. He knew
the boss would take his keys away the minute he realized Norman was leaving,
on the assumption that as soon as Norman became a free agent, he would try
to rip him off for everything he was worth. Kriegel could be expected to judge
others by his own predilections.

So Norman put everything into inserting
antidote DNA in an excellent strain of beer-making yeast. Then it would be
simple to make as much antidote as needed, whenever needed, with nothing but
a few brewing vats--except for the small problem that the yeast refused to
cooperate. It kept reverting to its original, undoctored form after a few
generations and he had the whole weary process to do over again. Babysitting
yeast cultures was the sort of work a technician would normally do, but Norman
could hardly assign this particular task to someone else.

Rudi stopped by on the second night as
she was leaving to go home. She had obviously been planning to say something,
but stood and looked at all the tubes and flasks and amplification machines
instead. Then she took her coat off, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and started
transferring yeast from one culture plate to the next where they belonged.

Norman gave her a grateful nod and together
they kept right on going till two in the morning. Kriegel did nothing to interfere
in all this activity. For all Norman could tell, he didn't even notice it.
Hopefully he was convinced Norman could make no move against him, just as
he couldn't against Norman, and would stay convinced for the remaining few
days that Norman needed.

The usual interruptions did not stop merely
because he needed them to. Dwayne's daily arrival around lunch time was heralded
by the Goony Boys or some other disagreeable band blaring from his computer
speakers. Each day Norman ground his sleep-deprived teeth a little harder.
Then came the day Dwayne downloaded about a hundred gigabytes of music videos
onto the server. The whole network went down for several hours and Norman
heard Kriegel himself yelling at Dwayne about keeping his goddamn personal
files on his goddamn personal computer.

"Well, hey, my disk isn't that big and
the server can take hundreds of gigabytes," said Dwayne, clearly wondering
why something so obvious needed to be explained. "I'll get them onto my own
CDs real soon." Norman heard Kriegel stomping off.

Late in the evening, as Norman checked
the computer for the latest yeast sequence results, he noticed that the huge
download had actually crashed part of the system. File allocation tables had
been swept up in the music, which overwrote most of the virtual drive he'd
used for the caf work. All traces of his files were gone forever.

Norman leaned back and boggled at the
strangeness of fate. To think that the many times he had barely restrained
himself from strangling Dwayne should have paid off so well.

Rudi was also there, still helping like
a trooper, plating out the newest generation of yeast. He showed her the computer
analysis. "So," she said, "it looks like we have a stable insertion of antidote
into yeast at this point, but how do you plan on getting it to people? Nobody's
going to inhale yeast if they can help it."

"Oh, but they will," countered Norman
without further explanation. Then he frowned and concluded morosely, "Always
assuming, of course, that I don't wind up fully occupied holding a tin cup
on Main Street."

"Yes," said Rudi. "What are you going
to do? Do you have anything lined up?"

"Um. Well. You know Vanessa Delaney? The
FedEx girl?"

Rudi nodded. She was the one signing for
deliveries if Norman wasn't around.

"We're, um, starting a brewpub." He was
afraid Rudi would start telling him all the reasons why this was a stupid,
young thing to do, like his mother had.

"Oh!" said Rudi instead. "Got it all worked
out, huh?"

"Um, yes. She's going to handle the people
and I'm going to handle the yeast." He made a slight face. "Unfortunately,
we're thirty thousand dollars short, but we've got to try to get it started."

"Thirty thousand dollars..." Rudi mused.
"Not chickenfeed." She started asking him a whole series of detailed questions
about the eventual brewpub while they checked the latest yeast generation
for the quality of antidote it carried.

Then she took a deep breath. "You know,
Kriegel was never my favorite boss. I got a settlement after the divorce.
It wasn't really enough to do anything with, and it was too much to just spend
without feeling like an idiot. What I'm saying is, well, what would you and
Vanessa think of me coming in as a third partner?"

*

The pub was doing a roaring
trade. Jovial workers lined up at the bar for more blue Bronco Brew. Orders
for crates of it were coming in from as far away as Hong Kong. It was such
wonderful beer they said. It had a marvelous effect on the whole system, it
toned you up and made you feel on top of things. Why was it blue, asked reporters
once the beer made the news. It was an old Romulan recipe, answered Norman
with his best postdoctoral face. Vanessa arranged a contract with one of the
largest names in brewing for facilities to make the stuff by the tanker ship.
Money poured in. Rudi invested hers in the nicely recovering stock market.

One day, Gerry Kriegel came into the pub
together with a flock of suits he was entertaining that night. Norman was
pretty sure he spotted Kriegel's pet congressman in the group. The pub had
become quite the new attraction in town.

"You seem to be doing pretty well for
yourself," he said to Norman who was doing his turn as barkeeper that night.

"So far, so good," said Norman hospitably,
repressing the urge to have his bouncers take care of Gerry Kriegel.

"Yes," said Kriegel amiably, "it must
be a lot easier to make beer than to do good science."

Kriegel looked down his nose at the brightly
colored label showing a sozzled horse drinking at a trough full of something
blue. "I'd hire somebody who knows something about marketing, if I were you,"
he said kindly from very high up. "What do you have that doesn't need to be
covered by a brown paper bag?"

Kriegel ordered several bottles of a very
nice and expensive white wine.

Later in the evening he and his cronies
ordered coffee. Judging by the resemblance between them and the horse on the
Bronco label, it wasn't doing them any good.

Postscript added after printing:

The people in "Powered by Water" have
let me know I missed something. One of the reasons Rudi split up with her
husband was that he imbibed a tad too freely, and she pointed out that recovering
alcoholics drink much coffee, but no beer. She told Norman to make a no-alcohol
version of Blue Bronco Brew, so that these good people would not be left
out of the solution, unlike the undeserving Kriegels of the world. To prevent
confusion, the label on the no-alcohol version depicts an alert, blue thoroughbred
nosing past the finish line rather than its sozzled cousin at the trough.